INTRODUCTION

Advances in technology has provided the availability of small and

low-cost sensor nodes with capability of sensing various types of
physical and environmental conditions, data processing, and wireless
communication. Variety of sensing capabilities results in profusion of
application areas. However, the characteristics of Wireless Sensor
Networks (WSN) require more effective methods for data forwarding
and processing.

The purpose of this report to provide general knowledge of

WSNs, application opportunities, and proposed routing for WSNs. Since
there are too many routing algorithms for data forwarding problem in
WSNs, only some of them will be presented in details. However, a full
comparison of all methods will be given.

What is Wireless Sensor

Network?
A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a wireless network consisting of
distributed self-organized autonomous devices using sensors to
cooperatively monitor physical or environmental conditions, such as
vibration, motion, temperature, sound etc.
A WSN node mainly consists of four main parts:
1- Processing unit,
2- Sensor
3- Transceiver
4- Energy Source Unit
Depending on usage purpose there may be additional
components such as localization unit, energy producer, position
changer etc. In the figure below, general architecture of WSN node
and a real example is represented
 Figure 1: WSN Node acrhitecture and a real example.
Note. Haroun, I.,Lambadaris, I., Hafez, R. (September, 2005). Building Wireless Sensor
Networks. Retrieved March 26, 2007 from the World Wide Web:
http://www.mwrf.com/Articles/ArticleID/11071/11071.html

WSN nodes generally have small sizes up to the size of a coin.

However, the sizes of WSN nodes may be furtherly decreased with
future advances in micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). Due to
low bandwidth and low energy sources, transmission range of nodes is
restricted with about approximately 30 meters. Thus, dense
deployment of nodes is required for more reliable data transmission.
The processing capacity of WSN nodes is also low both because of data
processed by WSN nodes are too small and energy is limited.
In contrast to multi-threaded/multi-process general-purpose
operating systems, WSN nodes use less complex operating systems
and event-driven programming models. In contrast to modern
operating systems, which consist of millions of lines of code, WSN
operating systems codes consists of just a few thousands of lines.
Some examples of WSN node operating systems are:
- TinyOS
- Contiki
- MANTIS
- BTnut
- SOS
- Nano-RK
Also it should be considered that, since WSN node hardware is similar
to embedded systems, it is possible to use some embedded operating
systems such as eCos, uC/OS for sensor networks.

Application Areas
There are many commercially available sensor types to
monitor variety of conditions including:
o Temperature

o Humidity

o Movement

o Lightning condition
o Pressure
o Soil makeup
o Noise levels
o Presence or absence of certain kinds of objects
o Mechanical stress levels on attached objects
o The current characteristics such as speed, direction and size of an object
As a result of availability of different kinds of sensors, there are
various the applications of WSNs. A general categorization of WSN
applications may include military applications, environmental
applications, health applications and other commercial applications.
Military Applications:
 Dense deployment of disposable and low-cost sensor nodes
makes WSN concept beneficial for battle fields. Some military
applications of WSNs are:

o Monitoring friendly forces, equipment and ammunition.

o Battlefield surveillance
o Exploration of opposing forces and terrain
o Targeting
o Battle damage assessment
o Nuclear, biological and chemical attack detection

Environmental Applications:
Although there are some other techniques to monitor
environmental conditions, random distribution and self organization of
WSNs make them suitable for environmental monitoring. Some
applications include:

o Biocomplexity mapping of environment

o Detection of natural disasters, such as fire, flood and eartquake
detection
o Precision agriculture
o Habitat monitoring
o Pollution detection
o Planetary exploration

Health Applications:
Tiny sizes and light-weight structure of WSN nodes provides many
functionality in health applications, including:

o Telemonitoring of human physiological data

o Tracking and monitoring doctors and patients
o Drug administration

Other Commercial Applications:

In addition to all of above, there are many commercial applications of
WSNs including

o Home automation for smart home environments

 o Interactive museums
o Environmental control in buildings
o Detecting and monitoring burglary/ thieving
o Vehicle tracking and detection
o Managing inventory control

Routing Techniques
Sharing information between physically separated hosts/ sources
requires both physical connections between these hosts in terms of
cables, links, etc. and a common language, called protocol, to make
these hosts understand each other. Networking concept is built on
variations of this principle. As in other networks, in WSNs we also need
some routing techniques / protocols between nodes to provide
connectivity among them in order to gather desired data. Although
WSNs have some similarities with traditional networks, currently
available routing protocols can not be directly applied to WSNs
because of some characteristics of WSNs listed below:

o low processing capacity

o difficult operations conditions
o limited energy source
o low bandwidth
o huge population in WSNs
o Non-predetermined position of sensor nodes

Design Issues of WSNs

Design of routing protocols in WSNs is influenced by many
challenging factors to be addressed. Some of them are:

o Node deployment
o Data reporting method
o Node/link heterogeneity
o Fault tolerance
o Scalability
o Transmission media
 o Connectivity
o Data aggregation
o Quality of service

Figure 2: Routing protocols in WSNs.

Note. J. N. AL-Karaki, A. E. Kamal, “Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks: A
Survey”, IEEE Wireless Communications, Volume 11, Issue 6, Dec. 2004 Page(s):6 - 28
As illustrated in figure 2, almost all routing methods can be classified into three
categories depending on networks structure:

o Flat routing
o Hierarchical routing
o Location-based routing

Furthermore, these protocols can be classified into subgroups

listed below, depending on protocol operation.

o Negotiation-based routing
o Multipath-based routing
o Query-based routing
o QoS-based routing
o Coherent based routing

In addition to above, depending on route determination, routing

protocols cans be classified into four categories as follows:

o Proactive routing protocols: All routes are computed before they

are used.
o Reactive routing protocols: Routes are computed as they are
needed.
o Hybrid routing protocols: uses both proactive and reactive routing
protocols.
o Cooperative routing protocols: Nodes send data to a central node
where more processing power and route information is available.
 Although in some special cases sensor nodes have mobilizers to
change the position, most of the sensor nodes are static, i.e. remains
in same position, therefore it is preferable to have table-driven routing
protocols rather than reactive protocols.

Flat Routing
In flat networks, each node typically plays the same role and
sensor nodes collaborate together to perform the sensing task. Due to
the large number of such nodes, it is not feasible to assign a global
identifier to each node. This consideration has led to data centric
routing, where the Base Station (BS) sends queries to certain regions
and waits for data from the sensors located in the selected regions.
Two main types of algorithms in flat routing are flooding, where each
node forwards data to all its neighbor so to much redundant data
occurs, and data-centric routing where there is no global identifiers
for nodes, instead data is identified using attribute based naming.

Sensor Protocols for Information via Negotiation

( SPIN )
This protocol uses the idea of distributing only the data that
other nodes do not have, assuming the nodes in close proximity have
similar data. Thus nodes avoid sending redundant data. Protocol starts
when SPIN node gathers new data. Node broadcasts an ADV message
containing metadata of newly obtained data. Any neighbor interested
in that data sends a REQ message. After that the actual DATA is sent
to neighbor node. Operation of SPIN network is illustrated in figure 2.
 Figure 3: The SPIN protocol.
Note.Wendi Heinzelman, Joanna Kulik, and Hari Balakrishnan, Adaptive Protocols for Information
Dissemination in Wireless Sensor Networks, Proc. 5th ACM/IEEE Mobicom Conference, Seattle, WA, August
1999.

Important advantage of SPIN protocol is that each node only

knows its single-hop neighbors therefore topological changes in
network localized, i.e. does not affect whole network. On the other
hand, SPIN protocol does not guarantee delivery of data because
intermediate nodes between source and destination nodes may not be
interested in advertised data, therefore such data may not be
forwarded to destination.

Directed Diffusion:
In spite of SPIN, where availability of data is advertised, in directed diffusion the
BS broadcasts interest which describes a task required to be done by the network. Up on
receiving the interest, each sensor node then stores the interest entry in its cache and sets
up a gradient toward itself to the nodes from which it receives the interest. When a node
 has data for broadcasted interest, it sends data through the interest’s gradient choosing
only best paths to avoid further flooding. The steps of directed diffusion process are
illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4 : Example of Directed Diffusion. (a) Propagate interest, (b) set up gradient and (c) send data.
I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirci. Wireless sensor networks: a survey. Computer Networks, 38(4):393–
422, April 2002.
Minimum Cost Forwarding Algorithm ( MCFA ):
In MCFA each node records the estimated least cost from itself to Base Station.
Initially at each node, the least cost is set to infinity ( ∞ ). The BS broadcasts a message
with the cost set zero. Whenever a node receives the broadcast message, compares the
cost of message with its estimated least cost. If the estimated cost on the message plus the
cost of current link is less than what the node has, the estimate on the message and the
estimate recorded by the node is updated and then message is broadcasted to neighbors,
otherwise the broadcast message is discarded. The figure 5 illustrates steps of this
process.
 Figure 5: Minimum Cost Forwarding Algorithm
a) each node set its least cost to BS as ∞
b) BS broadcast a message with least cost set to zero
c) if cost of message+link cost < local cost, update local cost and cost on the message, then re-
broadcast the message
d) if cost of message+link cost >= local cost, discart message

Important disadvantage of MCFA is that, the nodes that are far away from the
base station may get more broadcasts than those close to the BS. A solution to this
problem is to use a backoff algorithm to constrain nodes from sending broadcasts until a
* lc time elapsed from the time when message is updated, where a denotes a predefined
constant and lc is the link cost of received message.
Gradient Based Routing ( GBR): The paradigm in GBR is calculation of a
parameter, called height of the node, which is the minimum path between node and Base
Station (BS) in terms of the number of hops between them. The difference between a
node’s height and the height of its neighbor is called gradient of the link between them.
While forwarding data, nodes choose the links which have largest gradient.
 Figure 6: Gradient Based Routing.

In order to prolong network life time, GBR balances the traffic over the links
using three different data distribution techniques:

1. Stochastic Scheme: if there are two or more links having same gradient,
randomly choose one of them.
2. Energy Based Scheme: if the available energy of the node decreases
below of a certain level, the node increases its height to prevent other
nodes sending data to it.
3. Stream Based Scheme: new streams are not forwarded to the nodes
which are already being a part of other streams.

Other flat routing techniques are:

o Information-driven sensor querying and constrained anisotropic diffusion

routing
o COUGAR
o ACQUIRE
o Energy-Aware Routing

Hierarchical Routing
Although this type of routing methods originally proposed in
wired networks with their special advantages related to scalability and
efficient communication, they also provide energy-efficient routing in
WSNs. Some techniques that belong to this family are:

o LEACH protocol
o Power-Efficient Gathering in Sensor Information Systems
o Threshold-Sensitive Energy Efficient Protocols
o Small Minimum energy communication network ( MECN )
o Self-organizing protocol
o Hierarchical power-aware routing
o Two-Tier Data Dissemination

Location-Based Routing
In this type of protocols sensor nodes are addressed depending
on their locations. Relative coordinates of neighboring nodes is
obtained either by exchanging information between neighbor nodes or
by directly communicating with a Global Positioning System (GPS).
Some techniques that belong to this family are:

o Geographic Adaptive Fidelity

o Geographic and Energy Aware Routing (GEAR)
o MFR, DIR, and GEDIR
o The Greedy Other Adaptive Face Routing (GOAFR)
o SPAN

Conclusion
In this report I have tried to explain main concepts of WSN, its
features, applications, and finally some proposed routing protocols. I
have mentioned that flexible and low-cost structures of WSNs make
them applicable for various types of projects. The current situation of
WSN can be considered under three different aspects
 1) Electrical engineering perspective: hardware structure and
power consumption of WSN can be minimized further using benefits of
nanotechnology.
2) Network engineering perspective: although there are lots of
proposed routing methods for WSNs, still new methods are need and
currently existing ones need to be improved.
3) Project managing perspective: benefits of WSN, as a whole or
partially can be used in various projects.

References
I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam, and E. Cayirci.
Wireless sensor networks: a survey. Computer Networks,
38(4):393–422, April 2002.

J. N. AL-Karaki, A. E. Kamal, “Routing Techniques in

Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey”, IEEE Wireless
Communications, Volume 11, Issue 6, Dec. 2004 Page(s):6 – 28

Wendi Heinzelman, Joanna Kulik, and Hari Balakrishnan,

“Adaptive Protocols for Information Dissemination in
Wireless Sensor Networks”, Proc. 5th ACM/IEEE Mobicom
Conference, Seattle, WA, August 1999.